New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap

Published: July 22, 2010

Which led, unsurprisingly, to a bit of resentment within the bounce community, one that persists to this day. “A lot of the older, straight male rappers have been vocal about having problems with the whole sissy-bounce thing,” Fensterstock said, “but it’s more complicated than just homophobia. These guys have been performing and putting out records for 10 or 20 years. But Freedia’s getting so much publicity now that a lot of people who maybe have never heard of bounce before, or who haven’t thought about it since the ’90s, just think it’s all gay.”

Inaccurate (or paranoid) as that perception may be, the fact is that the notion of unabashedly gay hip-hop is like catnip to some alternative-music scenes around the country. Which puts the artists themselves in something of a bind: while sissy-bounce bookings offer them a rare chance to raise their national profiles, the last thing any of them wants is to put homosexuality at the forefront of what they do. At home, they perform in every sort of venue, before every sort of crowd: at sports bars, at Jazz Fest, at a recent museum benefit called “Sippin’ in Seersucker.” On record too, they fuse freely with other genres. Freedia, Nobby and Katey are all guest vocalists on the latest record from Galactic, a respected (and white) New Orleans funk outfit. And that is the music’s volatile essence: inside New Orleans, the genius of sissy bounce is how perfectly mainstream it is; in the world beyond, the genius of sissy bounce is how incredibly alternative it is.

Vockah Redu — who lives in Houston now, having gone there six years ago to study performing arts in college — probably chafes at the “sissy bounce” label more than anyone. “My daughter’s gonna be reading that soon,” he told me with a tight laugh. “But I’ll be able to explain it to her. It’s just stardom, and I feel like it’ll die down eventually. Right now the media’s buying it, so ‘sissy bounce’ it is.”

Two nights after the Sports Vue show, Vockah and Katey Red traveled to Austin, Tex., to perform at a garagelike space there called the Beauty Bar. This was something of a return engagement: a couple of months earlier there was a bounce showcase at what is probably the mecca of American alternative music, the South by Southwest Festival, and Katey and Vockah made such an impression — despite being just two of the seven bounce artists on the bill, the rest of whom were non-sissies — that they were invited back as part of a subsequent festival called Chaos in Tejas, mostly a collection of hardcore bands whose connection to bounce music per se would normally seem tenuous if not hostile.

Vockah came onstage at the Beauty Bar looking like a latter-day George Clinton, with an Indian wig, a long brown lab coat, purple tights and a gold top hat. Those clothes, and most of the rest of what he was wearing, were shed by the third or fourth song. Vockah has the looks and the bearing (and the dancing ability) of a star; indeed, he really needs a bigger stage than a venue like the Beauty Bar provides. He puts on a very theatrical show, featuring tightly choreographed dancing (in unison with his backup vocalists/dancers, known as the Cru), scripted patter (“Thank you,” he told the audience more than once, “for being a reflection of my gift”) and medleys and reprises rather than a straight set list. Compelling as he was, at times he seemed to lose the audience a bit; they were looking to be related to more directly. “I am not here representing New Orleans, I am not here representing bounce music, I am not here representing gay people,” he said near the end of the show. “I am an artist.” Clearly he is constructing a persona, and it is the type of persona that would go down better in front of a crowd of 20,000 than it did among the 200 heavily tattooed, overwhelmingly white alt-kids who were there for the fickle buzz provided by the authenticity of the new, of the ephemerally romanticized fringe that defines alternative music in the first place.